Albania, Alone Against the World (1980)
Albania, Alone Against the World[1]
Article and photographs by Mehmet Biber
"Let us fulfill all our obligations and smash the blockade,” admonishes this sign in the Albanian town of Shkodër-but Albania’s isolation from the world is the result of internal policy. Without allies and surrounded by nations that have historical ambitions to its land, Albania is organized to go it alone under the stern dictates of Enver Hoxha, who has held power for 36 years. The pickax and rifle symbols dominate public scenes. A dogmatic Marxist-Leninist, Hoxha broke with the Soviet Union, which he considers “revisionist,” in 1961, and severed his ties with the People’s Republic of China two years ago. The self-sufficient road is often a hard one. Private automobiles are banned, so Albanians travel by bicycle.
Visits by journalists are rare. Last year Mehmet Biber, a Turkish photographer then living in Istanbul, obtained a visa only months after journalist Sami Kohen, another Istanbul resident, had paid a visit. From conversations with Mr. Kohen and his own experiences, Mr. Biber brought back this first full report from Albania to appear in an American journal in many years.
HE JET AIRPLANE flew south from Yugoslavia out over the cobalt Adriatic, turned 90 degrees, and headed land- ward toward Albania.
In antiquity, Rome’s legions, coming down the Appian Way to Brindisi on the heel of Italy and crossing the Strait of Otranto, landed here and marched east on the great military highway to Thessalonica and Constantinople. Goths and Normans invaded. The Byzantine, Bulgarian, Serbian, and Venetian empires held sway. Next the Ottoman Turks ruled for nearly five cen- turies and made Albania the only predominantly Muslim country in Europe. Then came the armies of Mussolini and Hitler.
Today no international highway crosses Albania. Her 300 kilometers (185 miles) of railroad pass no frontier. No foreign plane is permitted to fly across her airspace. Com- mercial flights, such as our half-empty, biweekly flight from Belgrade, must come from seaward and in daylight hours only.
I looked around the cabin at the score of fellow passengers - an elderly woman, a diplomat, an Austrian professor of the Albanian language (only distantly related to other European tongues), and businessmen coming to buy minerals or to sell machinery. Where did I fit the prescription for visitors set by Albania’s dictator, Communist Party chief Enver Hoxha? He had declared his country “closed to enemies, spies, hippies. and hooligans, but open to friends (Marxist or non-Marxist), to revolutionaries and progressive democrats, to honest tourists who do not interfere in our affairs.”
More apt was a travel agent’s comment: “Only madmen, diplomats, and journalists go to Albania.” I was a Turkish journalist and had waited nearly a year to get my visa request approved.
We came in over the beach and coastal plain near Durrës and saw, beyond terraced hillsides, a jagged line of misty peaks riding across the horizon like a gigantic electrocar- diogram. I wondered what I would find in this tiny nation of 2.7 million people, the size of Maryland with fewer people, and as little known as Tibet.
Love, Albanian style, means piling into a truck and heading downtown for a brief civil-marriage ceremony. In 1967, when Hoxha proclaimed that the nation’s only religion should be “Albanianism,” more than 2,000 Islamic, Greek Orthodox, and Roman Catholic institutions were closed.
“Organize,” exhorts a placard as Albania’s soccer team plays Scotland in Tirana, the capital (following pages), in 1979 during the first European Cup game held in Alba- nia. A request by Scottish journalists to accompany their team was denied as an “arrogant and arbitrary ultimatum.”
For millennia descendants of ancient tribes, traditionally known as Illyrians, have hung on in this most rugged land in the Balkans “mountains” in Turkish. Amid peaks rising to 2,764 meters (9,068 feet), they followed an implacable clan code of honor that wiped out entire families through blood feuds lasting generations.
Today this Land of the Eagle is totally collectivized. Last stronghold of Stalinism, it is Europe’s most dogmatic Communist country, locked in the grip of a leader who has impelled the Continent’s most back ward nation out of the ashes of World War II in a drive to modernization, from stick plow to tractor, from handicraft and rushlight to factory and dynamo.
Here I would find an unusual social experiment: an entire generation growing up sealed off in a hard-line socialist laboratory, challenging the world, self-isolated, uncontaminated by East or West.
Unconsciously I stroked my goatee-and was startled by the sudden realization that I might lose it! Albania forbids entry to men with long hair or full beards, and to women in short skirts, flared trousers, and other dis- plays of bourgeois decadence. Tales abound of hapless visitors being packed off to the airport barber to be shorn.
But the soldier who met me at the airplane door was more intent on my passport than my goatee, and I descended in the noon sun of a September day into one of Europe’s smallest and sleepiest airports, shaded by palms and orange trees heavy with fruit.
NATIONAL MUSEUM OF TIRANA
They owe it all to Enver Hoxha. In his hometown of Gjirokastër, a banner (left, top) lauds the first secretary of the Party of Labor, who helped lead his countrymen to victory in World War II-Albania was the only Axis-occupied nation to win freedom without the aid of foreign troops. Hoxha allied with Stalin but reviled Khrushchev, depicted cringing at far left in a painting (above) glorifying a strident Hoxha at a confrontation in Moscow.
In a land of mountains, blood feuds still smolder among tightly knit clans. Here the winding River Vijosë flows beneath a footbridge near Tepelenë.
Kopi Kycyku greeted me in Turkish. A member of the Foreign Ministry’s hospitality committee, he would bring to my guide-interpreter each morning the day’s plan. Now he brought me espresso, expedited formalities, and ushered me into a Polish-made Fiat for the half hour’s ride to Tirana, the capital. Along the way brigades of peasants looked up from their labor in the fields. But we met little traffic on the road.
Traffic Cop Without Traffic
Life in Tirana centers around Skanderbeg Square, with its monument to the 15th- century hero who fought against the Ottoman Empire. The modern Palace of Culture faces it, as do several royal buildings of King Zog, who ruled in the late 1920s and 1930s. One of those now houses offices of the satirical magazine Hosteni; another, the old Parliament building, is a children’s theater.
For a kilometer from Skanderbeg Square to University Square stretches the Boulevard of Fallen Heroes, flanked by huge statues of Lenin and Stalin, the Communist Party headquarters, major ministries, and the soccer stadium. In the early afternoon the square looked deserted: an official car, a military vehicle, a bus, several bicycles, a scattering of old women sweeping the street. Yet in the center of the square stood a policeman solemnly directing traffic.
Albania allows no private cars, and its capital has only a score of cabs, all state owned. Most were lined up near the square. Albanians seldom use them.
We pulled up in front of the Hotel Dajti, built by the Italians in the early 1940s when the avenue was called Viale Savoia. It is one of Tirana’s two hotels for foreigners, and locals may not lodge in it.
My balconied room was decorated with a beautiful kilim rug. Downstairs in the gift shop, such a carpet sold for $20 a square meter in foreign currency.
Touch of class: A Tirana student learns ballet in a special fine-arts program. Before “liberation,” four out of five Alba-nians were illiterate. Today, the same proportion can read and write.
I checked the TV room-only local programs could be received. I studied press releases spread on a table in the big hall and paused before a display of journals: the magazine New Albania; Zëri i Popullit (Voice of the People), the party newspaper; and a sampling of Albania’s dailies, all similar in content. Paperback editions of Enver Hoxha’s books were available in several languages-but not one foreign newspaper, magazine, or book. It was as if the outside world did not exist.
Emerging from the hotel at dusk, I returned to Skanderbeg Square. What a change! It seemed that half of Tirana’s 200,000 people had gathered here after work. Some strolled the parklike walks along Stalin Boulevard, others conversed in small groups or clustered around kiosks to buy Albanian cigarettes, soft drinks, and papers. Young men and women flirted. Parents streamed to the Palace of Culture for a concert, play, or exhibition, while students crowded its national library. And amid the square’s chaos of buses, bicycles, and pedes trians, the policeman shrilly shepherded traffic with his whistle.
For about two hours the heart of Tirana throbbed with life, then fell silent again. Even the traffic officer had gone home.
Nation Spurns “Revisionist” Giants
The following morning Bashkim Babani, my guide-interpreter, a thin man in his mid 30s, took me through the Palace of Culture. Albanians are proud of this building, started by the Russians and left unfinished when they pulled out of Albania in 1961 as a result of an ideological split. Said my guide: “The “Do you get extra pay for overtime?” The Soviet revisionists and imperialists cut all aid to us and imposed an economic blockade, thinking we would soon perish. But we mobilized our forces and completed this building. It stands today as a symbol of our triumph.”
Breaking with “Khrushchev’s group of renegades,” Hoxha turned to the Soviet Union’s bitter foe, China’s Mao Zedong. Albania became China’s closest friend, her champion in the United Nations, and received between one and two billion dollars of economic and military aid. That lasted until 1978, when China’s growing rapprochement with the “imperialist” United States and “revisionist” Yugoslavia broke the “eternal friendship.” Claiming to perceive behind the “hypocritical smiles” of Mao’s successors “the perfidy...of one who stabs you in the night and mourns you by day,” Albania now remained the only citadel of “true Marxism-Leninism.”
Where would Albania turn this time?
From Tirana to the smallest village, in the streets, on buildings, in factories, schools, and farms, slogans proclaim the answer.
A banner in Skanderbeg Square reads: “Without any foreign aid and any credit from abroad, we rely entirely on our own forces.” On the old city hall: “We shall break the blockade and encirclement of imperialism and revisionism.” Atop the Prime Minister’s office: “Long live our people’s power.” A foreign-language class studies Hoxha’s slogan on the blackboard in English: “Let us build socialism with a pick in one hand and a rifle in the other.”
Hurling defiance to the world-seeing themselves opposed by giant China and menaced by the U.S.S.R. and its Easternbloc satellites; fearful and suspicious of neighboring Yugoslavia and Greece and the West-lilliputian Albania will go it alone.
How can she do it?
By mobilizing production. Plants often work three shifts to use machinery 24 hours a day. I saw tractors work fields by headlight, then go by truck at night to another farm complex for the morning plowing. As part of this “technical revolution,” some engineers, technicians, and workers add several hours to their daily eight, lengthening their 48-hour, six-day workweek.
“Do you get extra pay for overtime?” The question was put to a worker in a Tirana factory making spare truck and tractor parts.
“No, we don’t ask for it. We volunteer. because we believe this work is the way to break the blockade. This revolutionary spirit will lead us to victory.” Mark Toma retired at 60 three years ago. But now he is back at the same factory.
“We are united in this goal, to contribute to making our economy self-dependent. I am still strong. I cannot sit idle while the whole nation struggles.”
Did he receive pay?
“I’m already getting my pension.”
Civil servants, students, even party officials and diplomats put in at least one month’s labor a year in factory or on farm. Workers’ brigades compete in topping production quotas. This brings rewards in medals, citations, and extra days of vacation at a resort. Bulletin boards are full of “grumble sheets,” intended to improve morale and production through “self-criticism.”
At the Enver Hoxha factory in Tirana, my colleague Sami Kohen was proudly shown the first Albanian-made tractor. When the Chinese cut off aid, they left this factory, a hydroelectric dam, mines, and other major projects unfinished.
“The Chinese technicians even took all the plans,” the manager said angrily. “Then they tried to sabotage the factory by refusing to deliver needed machinery. But we completed the plant and got the machines and parts from other countries. Not as foreign aid or on credit. We had enough of such help from the Russians and Chinese. If we need something, we buy it from any country-in cash. Or we trade for it. That way we maintain our independence.”
In fact, the Albanian constitution of 1976 forbids credit deals, prohibiting bank loans from East or West.
Living Well, Albanian Style
Few other countries could have chosen this hard way to development. But Albania is ruled by an iron hand. And Albanians are used to privation. Hardship of earthquake and flood followed the horrors of war. When the Russians pulled out, severe drought raised the specter of starvation; many commodities were restricted.
Today, though Albania is far from prosperous, she has no serious shortages and no rationing. People are plainly dressed, but none are in rags. Families live in small flats or cottages, poorly furnished by Western standards. But compared with yesterday's misery, Albanians don't doubt that they do better today. And they take pride in their will to survive on their own terms: “We prefer to feed on grass if need be. We will never stretch our hand to the imperialists.”
“We experienced difficult days,” 71-yearold Kristo Teodori told Sami Kohen, on a visit to a cooperative at Finiq in southern Albania. “I spent my youth in misery, right on this plain. I worked hard for the landowner, yet could scarcely make a living. Today, thanks to Enver Hoxha, we live well.”
The old man shares a three-room house with his son, Jorgo, 47, his daughter-in-law, and her sister. Over Turkish coffee and cognac, he said the cooperative today comprises 17 villages with 8,000 inhabitants and 3,400 hectares of land, producing wheat, corn, rice, cotton, vegetables, fruit, pigs, and cows. Before the “liberation” this was 80 percent swamp.
The land belongs to the state; houses, tools, and seeds all belong to the cooperative, and each farmer gets a share of the output. The sale of any surplus helps maintain a health center, schools, shops, a theater, and sport facilities. The family's three working members earn enough for essentials, so Kristo Teodori can spend part of his monthly pension of 420 leks ($85) on cigarettes and cognac. “I call it “Enver Hoxha's bonus.”
Hoxha's regime launched its agrarian reform in 1945, taking land from owners and distributing it to peasants. Collectivization was completed in the 1960s. The results: drained and flood-controlled river valleys, irrigated farms, and hillside terraces. Mountainous Albania's arable land, once a scant 10 percent, has been doubled, malaria wiped out, health and social services vastly improved. Four decades ago Albanians could expect to live 38 years. Today they can look forward to 68.
In its challenge to the world, Albania also can rely on its mineral and energy resources. After South Africa and the Soviet Union, Albania stands third in production of chrome. Limited in needs, it is self-sufficient in energy-oil, some coal, abundant hydroelectric power from its dammed rivers. I saw power lines marching to all parts of the country. Mountain hamlets have been electrified, and Albania even sells surplus electricity to neighboring Yugoslavia and Greece.
Industrial, mineral, and agricultural products fill the “Albania Today” exhibition in Tirana. “Everything here is the product of our labor and sacrifice,” said Hysen Vaqarri, the exhibition director. “We even produce enough food for export. Nor does the world energy crisis affect us. We manufacture everything from radios to kitchenware. We do all this with our own forces- without foreign support.”
So intent are they on self-reliance that Albanians eschewed aid from the International Red Cross when an earthquake devastated the Shkodër region in northern Albania in April 1979.
Throughout Albania I watched students, both male and female, building roads, putting up houses, tilling farmland, working in factories. Albania's railroad system is extending northward primarily through student labor.
So said Gjergj Murra, Bashkim Çami, and Zelliha Kraga, history students at the State University in Tirana. Besides six class hours daily, they take one full day of military training a week.
“This physical labor lets us students get to know our country and people better, in- “And in your free time?” crease our practical knowledge, share our theoretical education, and lets us help build socialism.”
“What do you do after class?” “Study the day's lessons.”
“We stroll… go to the theater or movies listen to classical music.”
Courses last eight months. Then, besides the month of physical labor for students, there is a month of military service, girls as well as boys. All’high-school graduates must serve a year in a factory or on a farm before they can get a job or enter university.
“And after graduation?” “A year's training before getting a job. A graduate in medicine serves in a hospital. An engineer in a factory. Philosophy or language majors usually teach.”
University administrators said that 80 percent of the population was illiterate in 1938; today 80 percent can read and write. The university began in 1957 with 3,600 stu- dents. Enrollment today is 16,000, in seven faculties: engineering, political science, geology, history, economics, medicine, and natural sciences.
But no school of law. Why not?
“Our system has no need for lawyers,” came the answer. “Our citizens require no third person to defend them. The judges of the People's Courts, elected by the people, take their rights into consideration.”
Ominously, the Ministry of Justice disappeared in one of Enver Hoxha's many administrative reforms.
Marxism-Leninism is the core subject in all the faculties, leading to the student's “ideological formation.” Essential courses include the history of the Albanian Party of Labor, economic policies of capitalism and socialism, dialectical materialism, “revisionist” philosophy-and, of course, the works of Enver Hoxha. The five-year plan determines university admissions, with quotas by region and family occupation- one-third each for workers, farmers, and intellectuals. Those whose families were landlords or tradesmen under the previous system have a harder time.
Building feminism along with socialism, a Party of Labor tenet, has been hard in a tradition-steeped society. University women in Tirana practice for a Liberation Day parade (above). In Kavajë, workers inspect fine carpets (right), which are exported or sold in tourist hotels.
In Kavajë, female workers inspect valuable carpets, which are exported or sold in tourist hotels.
Garlands of peppers festoon a farmhouse near Lake Ohrid, part of Albania's boundary with Yugoslavia. A million and a half Albanians live across the border.
Harder work and more sacrifice are constantly urged by daily newspaper readings. Apple pickers hear the Voice of Youth as their day begins.
Terracing slopes by the Adriatic Sea (below) took heroic efforts, but citrus groves there help the nation feed itself. Albanians have dou bled their cultivated land in 35 years.
“What if students fail their exams?” “Our youth is idealistic. At the end of the year 96 percent pass. Those who fail are transferred to a farm or factory. Remember, our five-year plan designates how many doctors, engineers, geologists, scientists, and teachers the country needs each year. This university may not produce fewer. We must have the best young people to attain our goals in accordance with the plan.”
Working for the State
“The plan.” The phrase seemed to evoke awe whenever used. Indeed, in so dogmatically centralized an economy as Albania's the plan is sacred.
The plan is based on complete state ownership. Every shop, restaurant, and kiosk belongs to the state. Every taxi driver, barber, waiter, baker, and artist works for the state. Farmers work either on state-run farms or on state-sanctioned cooperatives.
Coming from inflation-plagued Turkey, I found an undeniable appeal in certain aspects of Albania's economy. No income tax. No inflation. No dependence on outside energy sources. And since everything is tightly controlled by the state, no price hikes-or wage increases.
Factory workers and farmers usually get 600 to 700 leks a month (a dollar is worth five leks); a university professor about 1,000. Wage leveling imposes a ceiling of 1,200 leks, except for top officials.
By Western standards, salaries are low. But so are many prices. In the shops I found meat from 12 to 18 leks a kilo ($1.10 to $1.60 a pound), bread 2 leks (18¢ a pound); a pack of local cigarettes costs 2 leks (40c).
Clothing strains the family budget. I looked at Albanian-made men's suits cost- ing a month's salary, and which I wouldn't want to buy. Shoes are 100 leks, shirts 50 leks-but the quality is poor. The plan limits Albania's 250 million dollars of imports largely to essential machinery, spare parts, and raw materials, balanced by exports.
Albania keeps rents low-usually not more than 5 percent of family income. But officials admit to a shortage of flats, particularly for newly married couples.
Health services and education are free, and Albanians spend little on transportation or amusements. Even Tirana offers little entertainment: a few theaters, presenting ideological films, plays, operas, and folklore programs, but no nightclubs, which smack of bourgeois decadence.
Tirana has more restaurants than other towns, but few can afford to dine out often. Albanians have their own strong grape spirit, raki, as well as brandy, wine, and beer. But they are not heavy drinkers. In Tirana a boy might take his girl friend to a park, weather permitting, or to see a film on the favorite theme, the antifascist National Liberation War.
Sami Kohen saw one factory-organized dance at the Palace of Culture. Young couples were stepping sedately to old fox-trots and tangos played by an amateur orchestra. Discipline and calm prevailed.
In fact, Albania's “cultural revolution” sets the tone for youthful behavior and appearance. Not only long hair and miniskirts, but also blue jeans, narrow trousers, and makeup are taboo. No drugs, premarital sex, off-color jokes, or chewing gum. Rock music and loud jazz are frowned on.
Foreign visitors usually spend the eve- nings in the Hotel Dajti bar, taverna, and restaurant, where the cuisine is relatively good. “Apart from embassy cocktail parties, there is hardly any other place to go, anything to do, or anybody to talk to,” groused a young Western diplomat, whose previous post was Paris.
I turned this into an opportunity to learn more about the roots of Albania's suspicions about the outside world.
“If I were an Albanian, I'd be suspicious too,” my informant began. “Time and again predatory neighbors have invaded: Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece took big slices of Albanian territory.
A partisan's pride reflects from scarf and medals during a celebration commemorating victory over the Axis powers in 1944. Partisans of the Marxist-based National Liberation Front fought the occupying Italians and their German successors. They also waged a successful civil war against anti-Communist groups for con- trol of the country.
Remember, a million. and a half Albanians live in Yugoslavia to- day, half as many as in Albania itself. For 70 years Greece claimed northern Epirus, which is southern Albania. While Western diplomats twiddled their thumbs, Mussolini marched in and took over the whole country in 1939. Later, Tito wanted to make Albania into a seventh Yugoslav republic. A his- tory like this leaves deep scars.”
Albania today has no diplomatic relations with the United States, Britain, or West Germany. Would this policy change now that Albania has fallen out with the Soviet Union and China?
“The United States is an arch-imperialist superpower, as threatening to us as social imperialist Russia and revisionist China,” a senior official of the Albanian Foreign Min- istry told Sami Kohen. “The Americans made approaches to us after the break with China, but we do not want to have anything to do with them.”
“Britain still holds 40 million dollars' worth of Albanian gold seized after World War II,” complained a journalist. “Germany refuses to pay us damages for the Nazi occupation, assessed at 4.5 billion dollars. We shall never accept diplomatic relations with either country without payment.”
Future Holds More of the Same
Today's Albania is shaped in the image of Enver Hoxha, now past 70. What after him? With the editor of Hosteni, the humor magazine, I recalled the Soviet Union's changes after Stalin and China's after Mao. Was there any possibility Albania might also soften after Enver Hoxha?
“You compare us with those revisionist countries?” he retorted, not amused. “No, nothing will change after Comrade Enver passes away. The party and the nation are strongly united. His teachings give us our direction. We shall not deviate from it.”
Rather than opening to the outside world, the self-isolated Albanians keep constantly on a war footing. Besides two years' military service for young men and women, all ablebodied citizens, whatever their profession, must serve a month or more every year in the armed forces. Frequent military exercises at all factories, farms, and offices prepare the people against attack.
Everywhere I traveled on the seacoast, in mountain passes, in fields, in city parks, amid blocks of flats-I saw civil-defense bunkers. They look like-and grow like- mushrooms, their popular name. “More steel and concrete goes for bunkers than for housing,” a diplomat told me.
I knew that Enver Hoxha was concerned about the future of Yugoslavia after Tito- and the nightmare of a Soviet occupation. Does Albania really feel threatened?
“We must be prepared for the worst,” an Albanian journalist told me. “But could tiny Albania hold out against the attack of a major power?”
Albania's weaponry, mostly Chinese made, is outmoded, and diplomatic observers in Tirana say the country may be looking for arms in Europe.
“Even if the enemy is numerically superior, we can stop them. The whole nation will mobilize instantly. Our mountains and rivers make Albania a natural fortress. Any attack would cost the invaders fearfully.”
I thought of the stone houses in Gjirokastër and other mountain towns, windowless walls below and loopholes above each house a fortress, the heritage of centuries of blood feuds. And I recalled the 15th-century citadel at Krujë-the stronghold from which Skanderbeg conducted 25 years of guerrilla warfare against the Ottomans.
Born Gjergj Kastrioti, and sent as a youthful hostage to the sultan's court, he had risen to high command in the Ottoman Empire. Renamed for Alexander the Great (Iskander Bey in Turkish), whom the Turks admired, Skanderbeg defected and led 300 Albanian knights to reclaim his inheritance. He renounced Islam and stemmed the Turkish tide in Europe until his death in 1468.
He lived on as a symbol of resistance. And it was under Skanderbeg's banner-the black double-headed eagle on a blood red field-that Enver Hoxha's partisans forged the independent Albania of today.
State Forbids “Opium of the People”
Rain grayed Lake Scutari and shrouded the wild North Albanian Alps that sentinel the border with the Yugoslav Republic of Montenegro. Alongside the lake's outlet, which is navigable all the way to the Adriatic, spreads Shkodër, the ancient capital of Illyria. Brooding over it, a medieval citadel recalls Venetian masters. A monument in a park there honors five Albanian partisans who sacrificed themselves holding off 300 Nazi invaders. Near it I was taken to visit Shkodër's Atheism Museum.
Under Marx's slogan, “Feja është opium për popullin Religion is the opium of the people,” the director, a cold, harsh-voiced man in gray, told me that religion had obstructed Albanian independence.
Because the Turks identified nationality with religion, Albanians of Muslim faith (some 70 percent of the population) were considered Turks.
Mountain tradition colors the finery worn by a woman of Albania's northern cultural group, the Ghegs. The Party of La-bor, dominated by the southern group, the Tosks, has worked to stamp out customs such as infant betrothals. But the “law of the mountains” - including death or lifelong ostracism and ridicule for offenses against women and children-lives on.
The Orthodox Christians (about 20 percent) were called Greeks, and the Roman Catholics (about 10 percent)[2] Latins. Services were thus conducted, not in Albanian, which was forbidden and didn't even get its Roman alphabet until 1908, but in three foreign languages: Arabic, Greek, and Latin. "During the struggle to build our Albanian nation," he continued, while showing me exhibits on clerical abuses, "the churches served as a fifth column for fas- cism, imperialism, and counterrevolution."
Hoxha's regime executed the clergy, sentenced them to labor camps, or assigned them to "productive work." Other Communist countries curb religion; Albania forbids it, proclaiming itself in 1967 "the first atheist state in the world." All 2,169 mosques, churches, monasteries, and other "centers of obscurantism and mysticism" have been closed, torn down, or transformed into rec- reation centers, clinics, warehouses, or sta- bles. Shkodër's great cathedral reverberates to the shouts of 2,000 basketball fans.
Albania's new generation knows only atheism. Marxist-Leninist faith replaces religious faith. Enver Hoxha's books, serialized in newspapers, quoted on the radio, gleaned for slogans, serve as a New Testament. Hoxha is hailed as a messiah-infinitely wise, farsighted, and benevolent, but also implacable toward his foes.
Leader Maintains High Profile
Living apart from his people in a heavily guarded compound off Fallen Heroes Boulevard, and riding in a curtained Mercedes, Enver Hoxha is omnipresent. His portrait looks down from walls everywhere, even from truck and tractor. His name is carved on hillsides in letters hundreds of feet high. His birthplace a two-story stone house in Gjirokastër-is a national shrine.
A master of Stalinist self-preservation, Hoxha has ruthlessly liquidated all opposition in the People's Socialist Republic of Albania. The revolutionary elite, convinced that human nature can be shaped by incessant indoctrination, has set out to forge a new Albanian citizen who will unquestion- ingly make any sacrifice in his nation's fight against "savage imperialist-revisionist encirclement" to build a socialist society free of the heresy of individualism, independent thought, or alien morality.
Telling a timeless story, a woman spins yarn from wool. Though all farms are collectivized, rural families are allowed to own a cow and a few sheep and are allotted small plots that produce a disproportionate share of the nation's crops.
While striving to remold its citizens, this tiny, once backward nation has pulled itself up impressively by its bootstraps. Take the big metallurgical plant at Elbasan, called the Steel of the Party; the hydroelectric station at Fierzë, dubbed the Light of the Party; a student enrollment of 700,000 against 56,000 in 1938; two radio transmitters in 1945 climbing to 52 in two decades; average life expectancy nearly doubling in four decades-certainly striking achievements.
The regime is also trying to dismantle the patriarchal clan structure that has provided social cohesion in Albania's mountain wilds. In doing so, it is stamping out vendettas, which, as late as 1920, accounted for one out of four male deaths. It has suppressed blood vengeance for adultery. (Highland tradition gave the husband the right to shoot his wife and her lover. Her family, in ritual approval, gave him a bullet!)
The reformers put an end to infant be- trothals and the sale of 12-year-old brides, and attacked customs chaining Albanian women, traditionally considered "long of hair and short of brains," to an inferior role.
One umbrella is enough for travelers near Lezhë. Resisting a rain of foreign gods, Albania goes it alone.
No corner of Albanian life, material or spiritual, has escaped Hoxha's drive for control. People with names "inappropriate or offensive" from a political, ideological, or moral viewpoint must change them. Not even the dead elude Hoxha's reforming zeal. Burials, paid for by the state, are in common ground, without the traditional separation by religion.
Turn over the glittering coin of increased literacy and you find the dark side of increased thought control, for the Directorate of Agitation and Propaganda determines what Albanians will read, just as the state determines who will work where, who will be rewarded, and who will be punished…
Wary Society Closes Its Doors
The harsh hand of history has embedded suspicion in the Albanian psyche. After three weeks in Albania, I realized how little I had been able to penetrate the facade of this portentous social experiment.
Never in my travels about the world had I experienced so closed a society, had I felt so much an island. Accompanied and watched constantly, I felt that the conspicuous yellow car I traveled in was like the clapper that warned of the medieval leper's approach.
My guide, Bashkim Babani, would step behind me to see what my camera was recording. He let me photograph the outside of industrial plants but not observe them at work, visit a hydroelectric dam but not the powerhouse. At a distillery I was given raki to drink but could not see its making. Requests to visit families and homes were politely parried or ignored.
No pictures of bunkers, no donkeys, nothing primitive of course. But Bashkim even stopped me from duplicating scenes on Albanian postcards. One citizen objected to my photographing children in front of Tirana's puppet theater. Bashkim discouraged taking pictures of a wedding procession. The regime downplays such traditional festivities. Nor do I recall ever seeing a pet dog or cat, bourgeois luxuries.
Once I struck up a direct conversation with a peasant in Turkish. Bashkim immediately switched to Albanian and translated the answers into the usual party jargon.
Nor could I penetrate his defenses. He I was correct and cordial, as were most Albanians. Only once did I encounter a breach of hospitality when a teenager on a collective grape farm near Shkodër spat in front of me and hurled an antiforeign slogan in my face. I tried to prime the pump by telling Bashkim of my life in Istanbul with my wife and son. But he never parted the curtain, as on Enver Hoxha's Mercedes, to allow me a glimpse of his life and private thoughts. Indeed, he seemed to embody the very attitude, the very mask, that his nation so defiantly wears.
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